Arthur Nelson Peters (1873-1953) was born in Manteno (Kankakee County) Illinois. His father, Henry Nelson Peters (1829-1892), was a member of the Fourth Illinois Volunteer Cavalry during the Civil War and witnessed the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. His mother, Charlotte Ellen Davis (1836-1893), occasionally wrote poetry for the Boston Cultivator during the 1850s. Arthur Nelson Peters married Brooksie Seamans (1886-1967), a daughter of Joshua Seamans (a confederate soldier from Arkansas); they had four children—Henry Nelson (1908-1963), Charley Joseph (1913-1942), Mary Ellen (1915-, Jay Hale's mother), and Arthur Nelson (1926- ).

Arthur Nelson Peters, along with his brothers, Fred Henry (1854-1922), Charley Joseph (1861-1912), and Frank Merrill (1867-1918), were civil engineers who became surveyors and railroad contractors early in life. Arthur Nelson Peters supervised track building for the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad and other smaller railroads throughout the midwest and the south. In 1913, he joined his brother’s railroad contracting company, Ball and Peters Railroad and General Contractors Company in Little Rock. It was owned by J. J. Ball and Fred Henry Peters and was one of the largest railroad contracting companies in the South. Arthur Nelson Peters worked there until World War I when he served as Captain in the U.S.

Army Corps of Engineers in France. After the war he became a third partner in Ball and Peters, and in 1924, two years after Fred Henry Peter's death, he bought out J. J. Ball’s interest in the company and renamed it A. N. Peters Construction Company.